PhD Scholarship in Genetic Programming for Data Mining Tasks Genetic Programming and Evolutionary Computing research group

Background
The Genetic Programming and Evolutionary Computing research group at Victoria University of Wellington was recently awarded a large research grant in Genetic Programming (GP) for data mining tasks by the Marsden Fund of New Zealand (similar to the National Science Foundation in USA).
We are looking for a good PhD student in this field. The grant will provide full funding for the student to cover the tuition fees, living allowance, and travel cost.

The Project
Data mining tasks arise in a wide variety of practical situations, ranging from classification to regression, clustering, and optimisation tasks. Since the 1990s, genetic programming (GP) has become a promising approach to building reliable data mining models quickly and automatically. GP uses ideas analogous to biological evolution to search the space of possible models to evolve a good solution for a particular task. GP has been applied to many data mining tasks and achieved some success. However, there are still limitations in program structures, representations, genetic operators, search algorithms and theoretical foundations in GP that restrict GP for difficult data mining tasks.

Applicants are invited from excellent and enthusiastic students wishing to undertake a PhD in this area. The successful applicant will extend the current research and address the methodological/ theoretical issues in GP and/or a real-world engineering applications in data mining using
GP and related evolutionary learning techniques.

The Student
Applications from both domestic and international students are invited. A strong background in C/C++/Java programming and a basic background in machine learning and pattern recognition are required. A good background in genetic programming, evolutionary computing, neural networks,
statistics, or statistics/operatio ns research is desired. Students should have a first class Honour or a Masters degree in computer science.

Unification of Immutability and Ownership I am actively looking for a PhD student in programming languages (ownership types and immutability) . I have full funding available to cover fees, living, and travel. Please email me for more information if you have a Masters or Honours degree and a good background in programming languages and/or type systems! Applications from both domestic and international students invited.

The Project
Object-oriented programs at run-time consist of objects – small software components that are created, changed, and destroyed as the program runs. The uncontrolled ability of objects to change other objects is well known to result in many errors in large systems.

Immutability – an ability to prevent changes to objects – is a mechanism that could be used to provide such control. While immutability controls whether an object can be changed, it is not enough: we need to be able to also control which objects can perform the changes.

Ownership – an ability to control which objects can access a given object – is a mechanism that can be used to control which objects are allowed to perform the changes. Immutability benefits greatly from ownership that prevents unauthorised objects from accessing and changing the object.

Immutability and ownership evolved separately: while some proposed languages attempt to support both, they treat them as independent concepts.

We propose to treat them as facets of a more general unified concept. This work aims to advance the science of programming by providing a unified treatment of immutability and ownership, simplifying both the theory and practice of object-oriented programming.

The Student
This project requires a strong mathematical logic or formal methods in Computer Science background.